Tacit Knowledge and Spoken Discourse

Michele Zappavigna

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441123831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Professional Linguistics is an emergent area of study within applied linguistics, using discourse analysis to assist people working in professional domains. This book examines tacit knowledge - that expertise that is considered to be lost when skilled practitioners leave an institution. Traditionally it has been argued that some aspects practical knowledge cannot be articulated. However, the premise of Polyani's theory of Tacit Knowing ("we know more than we can tell") does not account for latent patterns that linguists can uncover in spoken language. Understanding these discourse patterns provides a way to explore the assumptions people invoke, but do not make explicit in their work and working relationships. This book demonstrates an interview method grounded in systemic functional linguistics that probes the spoken discourse of IT professionals, through three field studies with actual corporations. It argues that 'we tell more than we know' and this 'telling more' resides in the taken-as-given patters of grammar and semantics, making meaning in ways which speakers themselves may not be attuned to.

1

Tacit Knowledge and Technology

Introduction

Most of us have been in the situation where we have been frustrated by technical discourses, perhaps through an encounter with an Information Technology (IT) helpdesk or when trying to understand the resident technical ‘guru’. The language of technologists¹ can be opaque to outsiders. One of the reasons for the impenetrability of ‘tech talk’ is that technologists hold extensive tacit knowledge about working with technology. This book seeks to uncover this kind of tacit knowledge by probing the grammatical patterns of technologists working in corporate organizations.

Using the discourse of technologists working in three corporate organizations as a case study, the fundamental argument that will be made is that tacit knowledge cannot be divorced from language. Instead, the process of knowing is a process of transforming experience into meaning with language. This perspective arises out of a systemic functional orientation to language and knowledge:

Instead of experience being construed by the mind, in the form of knowledge, we can say that experience is construed by the grammar; to ‘know’ something is to have transformed some portion of experience into meaning. (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 603)

In order to make this claim I will begin by critically reviewing Polanyi’s (1966b: 4) famous assumption that ‘we know more than we can tell’, which he used to justify the notion that tacit knowledge is ineffable. I will argue that Polanyi’s axiom does not account for a sufficiently nuanced view of linguistic communication and that analysing latent grammatical patterns in spoken texts can in fact illuminate tacit knowledge. Linguistics as a discipline is very much concerned with making visible patterns in language (and thus in experience and knowledge) that are not readily visible to the untrained eye.

This chapter begins by considering Polanyi’s Theory of Tacit Knowing (TTK), focusing in detail on his principle that tacit knowledge is ineffable. I will then review how various domains, from philosophy of science, linguistics, psychology to organizational science, have theorized concepts akin to tacit knowledge, employing different kinds of technicality.

The tacit turn away from language

Much of human experience is below-view, unattended to as we operate in the world, but integral to our performance as social creatures. We hold the experiential agility to be at once creative and efficient, to assimilate the novel and the familiar: in essence, to develop expertise. Over human history we have mythologized experts, such as the artisan, the witchdoctor and the physician by culturally locating their knowledge as hidden and unspeakable, in other words, as ‘tacit’. Thus it is not surprising that the dominant contemporary research perspective on what has been termed tacit knowledge maintains that it cannot be understood in terms of how people communicate with language (Polanyi 1969). This book, however, seeks to demonstrate that analysing latent linguistic patterns in spoken discourse, the kinds of patterns that linguists regularly explore, reveals tacit knowledge.

As a folk term, tacit knowledge has come to be associated with prosodies of meaning relating to silence and the unspoken. Tacit originates in the Latin, tacitus, meaning silent. Its synonyms refer to ineffability (e.g. unsaid, unspoken, unuttered, wordless, silent, undeclared, unexpressed and unvoiced) and to indirectness (e.g. implicit, implied, inferred and understood). Antonyms of tacit include explicit and expressed. These folk meanings about linguistic inexpressibility have directed research away from investigating how tacit knowledge might be manifest in language patterns. We should, however, consider whether silence is an attribute of tacit knowledge or an artefact of our lens.

The researcher attributed with coining tacit knowledge as a technical term is Michael Polanyi, though the general concept of practical knowledge can be traced at least as far as Aristotle’s notion of phronesis. While Polanyi may have introduced tacit knowledge into scholarly discourse, tacit knowing was his preferred term for the act of ‘tacit integration’ that his theory developed to explain the experience of knowing something. This conceptual position, casting knowing as a process rather than an object, (knowledge) is in accord with the movement in disciplines such as semiotics and linguistics away from a constituency-based view of meaning, towards a view of meaning as ‘in the making’ as we construe our experience of the world.

Polanyi’s TTK introduced a post-critical perspective on what it means to know, arguing that personal judgement characterizes knowledge claims even in disciplines such as the sciences that assert their objectivity. Despite his claim that ‘all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge’ (Polanyi 1969: 144), most studies drawing on TTK presuppose a dichotomy of tacit and ‘explicit’ knowledge. Indeed, the impetus to classify human knowledge as either tacit and intuitive, or conscious and experiential, has ancient pedigree. For example, Basque, the oldest language of Europe, originating some 7,000 years ago, distinguishes between knowing intrinsically (ezagutu) and knowing by learning (jakin).

Before exploring TTK, I will deal with Polanyi’s most famous axiom regarding the ineffability of tacit knowing since it is the principle that this book seeks to reconsider. The intent is not to invalidate TTK but to show how employing linguistic theory in conjunction with Polanyi’s work can extend our insight into tacit knowledge. As we will see in the chapters that follow, consideration of the complexities of human meaning-making, using a functional, stratified model of language can extend Polanyi’s theory and show that there are patterns in what we say that can give us further clues about tacit knowing.

The ineffability principle: What does it mean ‘to know more than we can tell’?

One of the central tenants of Polanyi’s TTK is that tacit knowledge cannot be articulated. Instead it is a form of ineffable knowledge which is not expressed through language but rather lived through experience:

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell. This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. Take an example. We know a person’s face, and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million. Yet we usually cannot tell how we recognize a face we know. So most of this knowledge cannot be put into words. (Polanyi 1966b: 4)

The claim that ‘we can know more than we can tell’ is an argument that tacit knowledge is not carried in language. It positions ineffability as a criteria for asserting the epistemological significance of knowledge of which we are not intentionally aware. According to the principle of ineffability, an identifying attribute of this knowledge is its a-linguistic instrumentality since while ‘the expert diagnostician, taxonomist and cotton-classer can indicate their clues and formulate their maxims, they know more than they can tell, knowing them only in practice, as instrumental particulars, and not explicitly, as objects’ (Polanyi 1958: 88).

However, it important to carefully consider what it means to tell in theorizing how we might know more than can be told. If telling means directly ‘transferring’ information to the mind of the listener, then this it is not a possible means for exposing tacit knowledge. This impoverished view of communication has been characterized by Reddy (1979) as employing a conduit metaphor whereby words are boxes with meanings inside that we send to other people. As Reddy (1979: 287) has noted with the following examples of lexical metaphor, the metalingual resources of English privilege this kind of view:

Whenever you have a good idea practice capturing it in words.

You have to put each concept into words very carefully.

If, however, we allow that telling involves negotiating meanings that are latent in the often implicit patterns of spoken discourse (and in turn subject to the interpretation of the listener), linguistic communication is reinstated as relevant to understanding tacit knowledge. Our account of telling should also allow for language to be considered as a social practice, being used as it is to enact the various genres that constitute social life.

The view of language characterized by the conduit metaphor is not a view that Polanyi would have condoned. Despite his claims about ineffability, Polanyi had a lot to say about language and, as I will cover later, developed a theory of ‘sense-making and sense-giving’ (Polanyi 1967). Given that Polanyi’s thesis about ‘personal knowledge’ was aimed at undermining the notion that science deals in objectivity, it is unlikely that TTK intended to adopt this kind of mathematical model of communication. Indeed TTK acknowledges that language use is itself tacit to the knower rather than an object ready to be transferred to someone else’s head:

While language expands human intelligence immensely beyond the purely tacit domain, the logic of language itself – the way language is used – remains tacit. (Polany 1966a: 7)

However, and importantly, Polanyi’s model neglects the very significant point that the field of linguistics has developed many tools for describing the complex patterns that can be uncovered in discourse and that these tools can make these tacit patterns visible. While Polanyi’s theory involves contemplating meaning, it does not acknowledge the role that linguistics and semiotics can play in exploring tacit language patterns. In theorizing tacit knowledge as unable to be communicated in language, Polanyi has factored out the power of linguistics to describe and explain what Polanyi terms ‘the tacit coefficients of language’ (Polanyi 1958).

Nevertheless, Polanyi’s concept of knowing more than one can express in language has been taken up by theorists in a variety of disciplines with vigour. The enthusiasm has meant that the opportunity that linguistic analysis affords in giving us greater insight into the nature of tacit knowledge has been obscured. The strong standpoint on ineffability is a superficial reading of Polanyi’s theory. Rather than arguing that one cannot speak at all about tacit coefficients, Polanyi focuses on the ‘adequacy’ of representation:

To assert that I have knowledge which is ineffable is not to deny that I can speak of it, but only that I can speak of it adequately, the assertion itself being an appraisal of this inadequacy. (Polanyi 1958: 91)

Explicit maxims that attempt to encapsulate or explain the craftsman’s practice are limited in their utility as ‘these never disclose fully the subsidiary known particulars of the art’, that is, they do not adequately represent the object of subsidiary awareness (Polanyi 1958: 90).

Polanyi’s arguments about knowing and telling separate knowledge and language. A functional approach to language, however, suggests that it does not make sense to distinguish between knowledge and language in the same way that it does not make sense to distinguish between language and thought (Butt 1985). Relevant to this perspective, is Douglas’s account of the misleading nature of the verb ‘to express’:

That word establishes a distinction between the expression and that which is expressed. The object of our study discloses no such cleavage. Knowledge is a continuous process of realization involving both the implicit and the explicit. (Douglas 1975: 8)

This ‘continuous process of realization’ can be modelled by looking how meanings are realized in language. We may articulate what we know tacitly through patterns and features of language to which we do not directly attend. This is an argument that articulation is not the equivalent of codification. It is the work of the discourse analyst to uncover the implicit meanings that are made in spoken texts, affording the potential for these implicit patterns to be celebrated or, where they may be impeding some social process, offer suggestions on how they might be changed (see for example the extensive tradition in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) of making explicit the language patterns of pedagogic discourse so that classroom teaching might be improved; summarized in Rose 2012).

Part 1: Introducing Polanyi’s TTK

TTK draws upon the perspective on human perception afforded by Gestalt psychology. In particular, it references the Gestalt idea of perceiving the whole while not being aware of the particulars. Two levels of awareness are presented as central to tacit knowing: focal awareness and subsidiary awareness. These are mutually exclusive states distinguished by the nature and degree of attention deployed: focal awareness is conscious, while subsidiary awareness is below-view. Polanyi (1969: 212) illustrates how these two systems of awareness operate with the example of stereovision. A person looking at a stereoscopic image is focally aware of the integrated stereoscopic image but has only subsidiary awareness of the two slightly different images that each eye sees. The knower integrates the differences in the two stereo images to form a joint visualization that has spatial depth. Such a process of integration is the fundamental configuration of tacit knowing and termed, tacit integration.

Tacit integration is the basis of our capacity to perform skilful action. For example, when hammering a nail ‘I have subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving the nail’ (Polanyi 1958: 55). The structure of such integration is likened to the proximal–distal relation in anatomy figured as the unusual construction of attending from something to something else:

Such is the functional relation between the two terms of tacit knowing: we know the first term only by relying on our awareness of it attending to the second. (Polanyi 1966b: 10)

In this way, the functional structure of tacit knowing, that is, the act of integrating subsidiary clues and a focal object, is directional since in ‘subordinating the subsidiary to the focal, tacit knowing is directed from the first to the second’ (Polanyi 1969: 141). It is.

Subsidiary awareness is further specified by TTK as incorporating two kinds of clues: subliminal or marginal (Table 1.1). On the one hand there are things that a knower cannot directly perceive. These subliminal clues include any of the neurophysiological bases of perception such as eye muscle contraction. On the other hand there are things which the knower could perceive if they were the focus of attention. These are marginal clues such as objects in the periphery of a knower’s field of vision.

Table 1.1 Types of awareness in Theory of Tacit Knowing

While subsidiary awareness appears to loosely correspond to the popular conception of the unconscious,² TTK is careful to distance it from this common-sense view, reiterating that, as a form of awareness, it must be considered in terms of the to–from structure at the heart of tacit knowing:

If this analysis convinces us of the presence of two very different kinds of awareness in tacit knowing, it should also prevent us from identifying them with conscious and unconscious awareness. Focal awareness is, of course, always fully conscious, but subsidiary awareness, or from-awareness, can exist at any level of consciousness, ranging from the subliminal to the fully conscious. (Polanyi and Prosch 1977: 39)

In this way, the model of awarenes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1 Tacit Knowledge and Technology
• 2 Under-Representation: A Functional Model of Tacit Knowledge
• 3 Misaligned Agency: Tacit Knowledge in Knowledge Management
• 4 Whose Requirements? Tacit Knowledge in Requirements Analysis
• 5 Working Well: Tacit Knowledge in Performance Reviews
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendix A The Grammar-Targeted Interview Protocol
• Appendix B: Interview Topics, Field Study 2
• Appendix C: Statistical Analysis of Interview Corpora
• Appendix D: Transitivity of Clauses Containing ‘Requirements’
• Appendix E: Extracts in which ‘Requirements’ are Construed as Aspects of the System
• Appendix F: Response to a Question about Knowledge Transfer, Project Manager, Content-Targeted Interview 2
• Appendix G: Participants and Processes in Clauses about ‘Tracing’
• Appendix H: Interview Topics, Field Study 3
• Appendix I: Transitivity of Clauses Containing ‘Role’
• Bibliography
• Index